Ploughing Tilling Fighting: – A History of Peasants on ARTE
To watch or rewatch with a critical eye.
Watching and rewatching the four episodes of “Le temps des paysans” is to revel in the work of documentary filmmaker Stan Neumann, who offers us a fresco rich in scientific, historical and social detail for Arte.
To follow its four episodes is to take note of our origins and understand the progressive annihilation of the peasantry from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 6th century. It is to explore and become aware of the accentuation of the processes of exploitation and alienation; it is to understand our proletarianization, our confinement in factories and cities and, at the same time, the destruction of our mother earth. But it is also to discover what small-scale farming is and the hopes of those who claim it today.
Thus, in an interview that the author gave to L’Humanité dans l’humanité on April 18, 2024, Stan Neumann expressed his astonishment:
“As in ‘Le Temps des ouvriers’, you draw a constant parallel between the history of the peasants and the present day. Did you expect so many convergences?
I was extremely surprised. Issues from the 12th century are reflected in the daily life of a Romanian peasant today. There is a parallel between the collectivization process in socialist movements and the consolidation and modernization process in Western Europe. I had no idea it was so convergent. I thus discovered, in the history of the peasantry, a very beautiful conception of the collective. Like a rural communism of the Middle Ages, but coupled with a libertarian utopia that would be anchored in tradition.
What difference do you notice between the peasant class and the working class?
The notion of freedom is different. In the struggles of the working class, there is an obsession with recognition and integration. However, we notice among the peasants a desire not to depend on any superior, any power. If we consider that the working world is organized by the structure of the factory, of production, the peasant world is more like a form of self-management.”
The italics are ours. However, this is not about idealizing a peasant world that also has its flaws, such as the parochialism well used by all reactionary forces throughout all historical eras, as the author clearly shows in the 4th episode. Nevertheless, we find there, in the peasantry, the basic elements and essential referents for building communalism, essential lessons for taking back our lives, taking back the land from the Megamachine: Capitalism, this automaton subject whose sole function is the valorization of value. This Megamachine, authoritarian in essence and knowing only unbridled growth, which in its mad rush has only caused repeated wars while gradually expelling us from our humanity, imposes all the other machines on us and leads us to destruction.
However, there are a few well-known shortcomings in this fine work that should be pointed out in order to fully understand the birth of capitalism and also to learn from the experiences of the not-so-distant past.
For example, in the third episode, the author misses the mark when he refers too quickly to the enclosures in England from the 16th century onwards. An opportunity to explain this key moment of anthropological rupture and the emergence of capitalism, which was accompanied like its shadow by state centralization, with the aim of dispossessing peasants of their common land and enslaving them for the benefit of the dispossessors.
The fourth episode misses the essence of the revolutionary teachings because even if the author does refer to the revolts and the resistance of the peasant proletariat, particularly the women in Italy, he makes no mention of the revolutionary moments and attempts of the time. For example, the silence on the “mirs”, these ancestral peasant communities in Russia that the “Soviet” dictatorship would destroy by force and against the will of the peasant masses. However, they would be fiercely demanded and defended between 1919 and 1921 by the Makhnovshchina, for whom they were the “flesh of the flesh of the Ukrainian peasantry”. And then there is the silence on “the greatest revolution of the 20th century” according to Guy Debord: the revolution in Spain between 1936 and 1939. And yet it can be said that it was there that the collective and self-managing creative capacity of the European peasantry in the 20th century was realized with the greatest clarity and radicalism, in the fields and beyond. For it was indeed in the Aragonese countryside that the revolution bore its greatest fruit, a decentralized and confederal communalist-type political and social organization based on the commune and then the collectivity, even though the revolution embraced all sectors of society, including factories. But this was a young proletariat whose veins were still irrigated with peasant blood, carrying the ancestral traditions and peasant organizations, those of the commons, claimed by the anarchists as the basis of all social organization.
To be seen and reviewed with these little critical touches illuminating the landscape and giving us an idea of the way forward.
Below are the links to the four episodes of this excellent documentary:
- Le temps des paysans (The Age of the Peasant) – episode 1/4
- Le temps des paysans (The Age of the Peasant) – episode 2/4
- Le temps des paysans (The Age of the Peasant) – episode 3/4
- Le temps des paysans (The Age of the Peasant) – episode 4/4
Rebound:
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.